Monday, September 24, 2007

I met a dentist today

We visited a quilt shop today to look at fabrics for a quilt Eileen is having made. Her friend is the owner. She's a Vietnamese woman named Thanh (Tahn) who moved to France for her education and then worked there for a time. She's a trained and practicing dentist here in Vietnam and was the same in Paris, France. When she and her husband moved back to VN from Paris, Thanh wanted to do something to help the women in the community gain employment so she opened this quilt store where the quilts are all hand stitched. The orders are taken at the store, fabrics selected, then sent to a village where the women sit on the floor and stitch for a fair wage. It's an interesting endeavor and she's very successful. She still practices dentistry but only a few days per week. She is familiar with Ivoclar Vivadent's products and uses our composites and a few products I don't know about. She is amazed how inexpensively she can purchase products here in VN and can't figure it out. Compared to what she pays in France (which is off the charts expensive, according to her) she can't figure out how a company can make money selling them so inexpensively here and knows someone is paying for it in the long run. I'm not sure how all that works, either, but now I'm curious...

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